Patients often feel alone and isolated as they try to manage their health condition, especially once they leave the care of their physician or health care professional (HCP). Saddled with a long list of things to do (e.g. interventions, medications, health monitoring, lifestyle changes, diet modifications, symptom tracking, and so on), patients are often overwhelmed and ill-equipped to perform self-care upon discharge from a hospital or leaving the physician's office.
Once a patient has come home, the at-home environment is completely different from the hospital environment and lacks the critical care tools and most importantly the HCP who could monitor them on a regular basis.
Access to integrated, direct and reliable communication between patients and their support network (e.g. physicians, nurses, social workers, family members, psychologists, etc.) is no longer present once patients leave hospitals.
In addition, the patient's illness itself, interventions required, expectations to complete activities they were never trained for and lack of immediate support are often the barriers to good health outcomes.
Further, patients are increasingly not given ample time by physicians to articulate their day to day health issues. For example, average consult time with physicians is 10 minutes which prevents patients from disclosing an extensive review or update about their state of health. This situation pushed the traditional view and practice that patients are essentially recipients of health care and advice. In reality, patients can be an enormous source of health information from recording their day to day activities in real world, real time which capture broader and deeper health information beyond what clinicians capture inside the clinical, hospital or laboratory settings. Patient-driven data can provide enormous supplementary knowledge and insights that could influence the course and timing of patient care.
Studies reveal that storytelling or the ability of patients to share their health experiences to others is comforting and healing. Traditionally, patients use paper and pencil to record important information or track certain health metrics that only patients know because they experience it daily, beyond the usual bioinformatics that are tracked by healthcare professionals. Some patients find it helpful to monitor their mood, their diet, exercise or other activities relevant to their specific conditions but current modalities are either still dependent on paper or are not integrated, making it a challenge for patients or even their care providers to get a holistic picture of the patient experience outside the clinical setting. A more holistic understanding of the full, real world, real time patient journey and experiences could potentially improve the course and timing of patient care. Furthermore, today's pharmaceutical marketers are faced with a new competitive landscape characterized by an increasing shift of decision-making power on brand choice from the traditional promotional targets (the physicians and pharmacists) to the actual consumers—the empowered patients.
Patients' knowledge, experiences, psychosocial dispositions and self-care cultures have been progressively brought into their conversations with physicians and have had the power to reaffirm, revise, or completely alter the physicians' brand choices.
Marketing efforts designed around influencing physician behaviors have given diminishing returns in recent years, as differentiated campaigns have been harder to mount, and physician choices have encountered increasing pressure from both payors and patients.
Understanding the mindsets, behaviors and decision-making framework of patients is becoming indispensable for marketers to determine the critical factors influencing patient's opinions that they bring into conversations with their physicians and pharmacists. As patients become more medically-informed and assertive about their care, patient insights and sentiments increasingly shape the final prescription and thereafter the final brand choice at point of purchase.
Traditional data available to marketers focuses on actual and projected point-of-prescription and point-of-sale metrics such as physician prescription habits and pharmacy dispensing data. Commercial leaders have for years relied mostly on permutations of these audits to track marketing and sales effectiveness, making do with the limited parameters and supplementing understanding with more in-depth primary research among doctors and pharmacists.
In between doctors' prescription and purchases at the pharmacies, however, is the critical area of patient decision-making, which can explain gaps in prescription fulfillment as well as motivations to stop, continue, or modify adherence to the prescribed drug regimen.
For pharmaceutical marketers, it is of significant value to measure the levers that influence patient behavior towards treatment adoption, adherence and advocacy. Programs targeting patient-centric metrics may help with driving brand recognition, acceptance and loyalty, which is now only marginally increased with physician-centered campaigns.
Therefore, improved solutions are desired to address one or more of the above-mentioned problems.